In this paper we use an intraorganisational ecology perspective to
build a theory of the antecedents of initiative selection. Thus, we
wish to explain what it is about initiatives that facilitates
positive internal selection. We hypothesise several initiative
characteristics that may more or less favourably interact with the
firm's internal selection environment and which may thus influence
initiative selection. We test these hypotheses using data on 1,116
initiatives we collected from the global R&D organisation of a
multinational firm.
Our findings show that initiative survival is positively influenced
by the sponsoring unit's geographical closeness to corporate
headquarters, by the past success record of the manager responsible
for the initiative (i.e., the number of already recognised
initiatives championed by that manager). In contrast, initiatives
that entail project complexity when implemented and initiatives that
propose exploratory rather than exploitative innovation are less
likely to survive than others. Past success is also found to
positively condition the negative influence of initiative complexity
and exploratory content on survival. Finally, the theoretical
implications of these findings are discussed.

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